


Happy Father’s Day, Indeed

by MissAtomicBomb77



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 21:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1793890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAtomicBomb77/pseuds/MissAtomicBomb77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Happy Father's Day, Charlie. May this day come to mean to you exactly what this day now means to me…absolutely nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Father’s Day, Indeed

It could have been embarrassing, he supposed, if he assigned emotion to it. Which he didn’t, and such interpretation had always contributed to his aloof demeanor. Everything he heard, everything he did was processed without emotion, now, more so than ever before as the slow realization of plans well laid were slowly going astray.

He had only been to the cemetery once before on a very gloomy and overcast day and not in the metaphorical sense. The weather had been threatening all day, and it had matched his mood. Not to mention on that day, he was treated as a king to a sad kingdom and people did nothing except wait on him hand and foot. He remembers stupid things about that day, what he was wearing, the car he was in, what was for lunch – a level of detail he tended to airbrush out in other things – but he could not remember how to get to the burial site.

The woman at the desk of the funeral home at the entrance of the cemetery simply took a map from the stack that she had and looked at the information on her computer screen, back to the map, to the screen and in a careful hand, indicated the place. He has to admire her efficiency and lack of small talk as she factually explains the easiest way to get where he’s going. He thanks her simply and they give each other a curt nod as he walks out to the welcoming grass and temperate day that used to be able to claim as his.

After a decent walk, because it seemed stupid to drive and lazy to do so, he finds himself standing at a place he never wanted to exist. He finds it odd to look at, this grey stone bench. It’s his first time to lay his eyes on it, because it wasn’t here the day they buried David. He remembers fighting about this cold stone bench, questioning the purpose other than proclaiming who was in the ground below, wondering who it was for. No one was coming to see him here anyway, for the sparsely attended funeral told him that.

He and his wife Linda had spent the last three years of their marriage yelling about David and his funeral was one last thing to passionately argue about. When he could take no more of Linda’s shrill voice, he acquiesced and told her to pick whatever she wanted for his headstone. He confirms today that it was for her, for there’s a worn piece of ground where grass no longer grows, obvious enough that someone visits regularly. Part of him thinks that has to be unhealthy, but because he’s never taken the time to be here, he decides that he’s not qualified to judge.

So he stands here, with his hands in his pant pockets, his suit jacket flaring out. He’s not about to talk to the ground, or the bench. There’s nothing to be said. Because what’s the point of saying anything at all? 

He struggles to remember now how he and Linda ever got along enough to be married, let alone to have a son that would grow to be the composite of their worst traits. Then he remembers that a child wasn’t a part of the plan. They had no desire to be parents because at the time, he was still doing field work, going to places no American should have been, doing things that he still can’t talk about twenty years later. She was light and she was funny and could deal with the fact that they couldn’t discuss his work because she was under the same constraints as a strategic consultant for the Navy.

After fifteen years of marriage, suddenly there was David who was born weeks earlier than he should have been and he promised them both, right there in NICU that he would give up field work at age forty two. Because when David pulled through he knew deep down in his heart, a surge of fatherly pride that his son would be able to do anything. Their familial bliss would be short lived as the expenses mounted and there was little choice but to go back in the field. He had unwillingly made Linda a single mother for a number of years. 

Little tremors in the beginning, tremendous quakes later as the relationship they had built for two was broken indirectly by David and by their inability to agree on David’s best interests. Linda wanted nothing more than to shelter him, to protect him, to dote over and fawn over him. They reached the point where conversations about David were arguments about David. Soon enough, he had no strength to argue, he became someone that said his piece and would be done. In the end, it was what Linda wanted to that would come to pass. 

Looking back, he supposed that all the constant arguing could have done nothing for David’s self confidence. He doesn’t really know for sure what lead David to do drugs, the reasons that David may have had, if any at all. Likely because he’s never understood addiction. Maybe he’s never understood a lot of things. The only thing that governs him now is that somehow, David’s death could have been prevented. David had finally found something to engage in, a passion that was taken away from him and caused him to spiral out of control.

He lays this at the feet of Charlie Skinner.

He made plans, elaborate plans as chance and fate gave him an opportunity. Would it be considered revenge? He doesn’t know if that it was it really was. It wasn’t revenge in the biblical sense; it wasn’t an eye for an eye, it was more of a lifetime of accomplishments to atone for his personal failures. As much as he finds himself blaming the world and the list of names, a part of him knows who to blame. He sees the man in the mirror every morning. That doesn’t stop him from trying to wash his hands of his son’s blood.

He thought about having Charlie Skinner killed before deciding that life remaining in shame would be a greater punishment, a hell on earth that he could enjoy. He reached too far and while the public shame is a delight, a salve on the greater wound, it isn’t the cure. So he dreams of the cure and finds himself drifting back to simpler things. Death for Charlie Skinner was entirely too easy. Not to mention that he misjudged the value Charlie assigned to his lifetime of work. Charlie seems undaunted by the weight of the world closing in on him.

He decides then that perhaps he had the right idea in the beginning, but just needed to shift his focus a little bit. A doting daughter for his son seems to be a fair exchange. He would want her to know why, certainly, that her father, the man she’s loved for her whole life is the reason why she has to pay a price. He’s done his reconnaissance, and he believes the cure of Sofia Lilith Skinner, with her dark hair and her large eyes begging for her life right here in this very place would suffice. 

Happy Father’s Day, indeed.


End file.
